Friday, May 19, 2017

Nature Notes Redivivus

May 19, 2017: First trip to the cabin in the woods. Electricity. But no Water (maybe tomorrow). Beautiful Day. Started out in the upper 80s, now, 63. 93 in NYC as we left.

We have missed the daffodils. But in exuberant bloom: lilacs (best year ever), a sprinkling of lily of the valley, and the scarce but treasured (by me) Alium (yes, of the onion family). Two of them are bending gently in the breeze. Little violets everywhere. Sweet meadow just budding.

Wasps seemed dazed by the recent heat. So far, no ticks, but it's said to be a banner year east of the Hudson.

Evening June light shimmers through the trees. What will night bring?

7:45: Two turkeys in the meadow....Gigantic! Mating season, I wager.

May 20: First tic sighting on shirt left overnight on the rocking chair. Doing away with it required grabbing it in a paper towel, getting a hammer, can pounding away on a stone. Still a little leg waving after all of that.

I used to keep track of "nature" appearances here on the dotCommonweal posts. Alas, I have no idea if nature is ahead or behind herself this year. Another great loss!

Crows have come and gone. Wish I could figure out how to get them to stay short of throwing road kill in the back yard.

Herbs shot up during the recent warm days. Waiting for lilacs to stop blooming so I can cut them back.

Lots of sandhill crane sightings, but no baby bunnies so far. I fear they may have left our hedge for greener pastures. Lots of dead deer on the roadsides, ergo many buzzards. No predators for the deer but cars. The population is completely out of hand.

I find them inspiring. They mate for life, eat what no one else wants, and they are often the only creatures out in subzero weather, high on a wire in the wind. I see them as loyal, humble, resourceful, and sturdy.

They like suet, but I've never been able to get them interested in coming around regularly. They seem to prefer getting their own food.

One year I threw out bits of some old Mardi Gras beads, and the crows came to inspect them, grackling among themselves as if talking over which bits to take and eyeing them sidesaus. They knew they weren't food, so they must have taken the ones they thought were pretty.

I read that they travel in family units. They have two nestlings, one of which goes away and the other hangs around through the winter like an overgrown teenager. He leaves when the new nestlings come in spring.

Crows in Japan were spotted dropping nuts at traffic intersections so the cars would crack the shells. A camera study showed that the crows could read the traffic light changes, so they knew when the cars would stop and they could retrieve the nuts. They can also trick other birds, pretending to hide food in one place, while actually stashing it elsewhere.

They're good for nothing other than the pleasure of watching them, though they supposedly brought SS Cuthbert and Guthlac supplies occasionally.

Crows seem to like to hang around shopping malls here. I suppose people drop food in the parking lots. It was sad a few years back when there was an outbreak of West Nile and the crows were gone, it must have hit them particularly hard. Now they have made a comeback. I can't tell a crow from a raven. Don't know why ravens are the crows' cooler cousins, they name sports teams and occasionally children after them.

Crows aren't that sociable outside their immediate families and don't generally roost in numbers unless there is something of general interest or a common danger. Could have been a larger dead animal or pile of garbage. Something lots bigger than a mouse.

They will roost if predators are feeding on a large carcass. They're waiting for the predators to get done so they can finish up.

If you have hawks around, sometimes crows will roost for safety in numbers.

Ravens are bigger, have fluffy heads, croak rather than caw, have curved beaks, and flat tails. They hang around people less. Incredibly smart.

Well now that I focused on Crow numbers, it's probably a family that's been out there and not a tribe. The largest carcasses available in this territory are deer or bear, but only humans can kill them and they haven't...Hawks often circling above, but the pickings must be smallish, mice, chipmunks, squirrels, ferrets...

This just in: I went to the Commonweal web site and typed in "Nature Notes"; there are all there but without comments, which was the point of the whole thing. But at least I know I haven't missed the fire flies or the profuse mountain laurel.

Margaret, Will you all go together to pull wild mountain thyme all around the blooming heather. Will ye go, Lassie, go?

During my wild summer as a lumberjack in northern Wisconsin, we drove ticks out of our skin by holding the hot end of a cigarette near them. If we got the distance exactly right, they would explode. We used to do it for the tourists who didn't know that we, too, were up from Milwaukee. Of course, they'd make us put out the cigarettes if we tried that today.

Ah Thyme! This isn't thyme territory. Have tried over the years, but not much interest. Soil too sandy, too much clay, stones, etc. There's a reason this beautiful territory was never farmland!

Ticks: in previous years, I have pulled them right out, sometimes with a tweezer. Put them in a jar and starve them; takes a long time. Oh to be young again with a cigarette and a lighter.

This isn't exactly Lyme Disease territory, but it's close, so every time a tick digs in, there is the wait to see if the bulls-eye spot appears or joints go awry. Of course, ticks carry many other diseases, but not to worry.

Fordham Tick Index is at five...one low/ten high.Just in case you need to know: https://www.fordham.edu/info/21491/indices/3038/fordham_tick_index

I grew up in a dense Chicago neighborhood and wildlife for me was squirrels, rats, and pigeons. The great outdoors has always left me cold. I like it when a yellow oriole shows up at the window (always pointed out to me by my cats). But when I go on vacation, I want to be in a settled area near people.

Please take Raber with you in your next vacay! I used to take him camping and it gave him the creeps because it was too quiet. He had never seen a chipmunk and they scared him because they were "too nervous" and might run up his pant leg. He spent most of the time in the truck listening to the radio.

I learned one lesson on my wilderness trips. Don't try to outsmart the racoons. After they got inside one of our food cases despite the several complicated clasps, I figured I would outbrawn them. I set a 100 pound rock on the case. Little bastards couldn't lift THAT.

Patrick Shannon: "I grew up in a dense Chicago neighborhood and wildlife for me was squirrels, rats, and pigeons."

I am not going to contest your experience, but "Dense Chicago Neighborhood" seems a stretch. Didn't you have an alley running behind your house/apt.building and wasn't there a yard? Alleys were one of the great childhood connectors, refuges, and escape hatches. So how dense could it be?

My intro to nature was a back yard with a Catalpa tree, grass, sometime flowers. And from there you just moved on with boy/girl scouts to the Forest Preserves that surrounded Chicago. And when you grow up you can camp in the Adirondacks, or like Stanley, head to the roaring rivers of Canada.

Growing up in Upper Darby, a row house city-dense suburb of Philadelphia, we kids had a wonderful escape. An abandoned, overgrown golf course. It was our jungle. And train tracks with a trestle ran by it. So much fun to drop coke bottles from the trestle onto the concrete pilings below and watch them explode into powder. It was worth losing the 2 cent deposit.As for the alley, it was our playground constantly surveilled by the mothers in the kitchens. Great system. One big playdate.

There's a great research topic: Compare cities that have allies with cities that don't. No allies in Manhattan (of anywhere in NYC for all I know), so the garbage trucks wrestle for street space with cars, buses, and delivery trucks. Of course, if allies had been put in, today the city would be selling them to developers for sliver buildings.

Hey, Margaret, what about Schubert Alley? Granted, it's not the kind of alley we knew in Chicago, and the driver would get a ticket if he tried to take a garbage truck down it (although I did see a Playbill panel truck there once), but it is known, with New York grandiosity, as an alley. And then New York used to have Alvin Alley.

We had private alleys behind the row homes in South Philly. They weren't a play space, but a passageway for people to pass less noticed. Sanitation also did not clean them, so on some blocks they were a public health hazard. No fond memories there.

Margaret Steinfels, of course we had alleys and sidewalks. But there were really no yards; at least none we could play in. And after the Dutch Elm Disease, we really didn't have any trees either. And no animals other than the ones I mentioned.

There were forest preserves to the west of the city. But we didn't go out there. Our parents didn't take us and although we might have gone there ourselves on our bikes when we got older, we spent our free time sneaking downtown instead. I don't know that my childhood meant that I wouldn't like the great outdoors. And I wish I did, because so many people tell me great things that rivers and trees do for them. But they sort of leave me cold.

I find trees very calming; perhaps it's because they're green. There's a huge maple straight out the window that I'm watching as I write. Not full-leafed yet.

I am currently reading "The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate." by one Peter Wohlleben, a German forester. Sounds loopy. But his general line is trees have biological ways of connecting with one another especially in old, uncut dense forests. Makes sense. Especially if you have Druid ancestry (CF. Saint Boniface and the conversion of the Saxons).

"The Hidden Life of Trees" sounds interesting. I'll have to see if our library has it. One of the reviews on Amazon criticizes it for saying that trees can feel pain, calls it anthropomorphism. But if you've ever seen trees after a bad windstorm, it looks like they have suffered.

Haven't gotten to the "pain" comments yet, but the author makes sense in making biological connections among trees. But what do I know? Not a physicist or biologist, but it definitely channels my Druid genes.

I used to do week to 10 day canoeing expeditions every few years with a couple friends, before GPS and satellite emergency call systems. Algonquin provincial Park in Canada and the Allagash River in Maine, mostly. My last excursion 15 years ago was a seaplane fly in to a Quebec Lake and then 30 straight miles of nearly uninterrupted white water. Since then, Germany trips and at the most, sissy car camping. It's the female company I keep these days. The guys I adventured with are old or dead. Trying to figure out which I am, at the moment. But I would love to get out there one more time where there's no one to hear you call for help except your mates. I miss it. Immersed in nature outside the envelope of civilization,though we didn't reject the high tech equipment made from space age materials.

I suggest a corn maze. These things are vast, complicated things that require expert orienteering. I nearly lost several eight-year-olds (one of whim was claustrophobic) in one many years ago. The only reason we got out alive was because I kept the barn roof in sight at all times and used it as a directional point. What a nightmare.

I grew up with family camping trips and then camping with friends when I was a teen and adult. Part of my honeymoon was spent camping near Yosemite. But then, I live in California, the land of the gods, and you poor tick-ridden devils are on the east coast ;)

Yes, Crystal, ours is a more complex ecosystem. In PA, we have rattlers and copperheads, too. Years ago on a hike at the Delaware Water Gap, I caught a glimpse of a copperhead at my feet. He lunged but didn't get me. Given the right circumstances, even white men can jump.

Yesterday when the plumber came to fix all the leaks in our one-sink water system, he asked the usual question, all locals ask it, "seen any rattle snakes?" We live one mile from the local town and its inhabitants think there are thousands of rattlers up in the hillesone mile away, and that we live amongst them. Never seen a rattler, except in New Mexico. I guess all the New York rattlers have migrated south to PA, per Stanley's testimony.

There are lots of ecosystems here, from deserts to rainforest-y parts and mountains and also farm land. Lots of critters. Lots of bugs. The worst bug place I've been was Hawaii - huge flying cockroaches.

End of May beginning of June from 5-7:30 PM, our NY neighborhood is flooded with celestial light. I speculate that it a combination of sun higher in the sky and sun light reflecting off the rivers, bays, and ocean that surround the city. Or maybe I need to clean my glasses.